Why You Feel Lost in Life: Dr. Gabor Maté on Trauma & How to Heal

Mel Robbins (00:00:19):

I had a wildly traumatic birth and I got rushed to emergency surgery.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:00:24):

Oh gosh.

 

Mel Robbins (00:00:25):

And lost two and a half liters of blood.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:00:27):

Oh gosh.

 

Mel Robbins (00:00:27):

And they sent Sawyer home with Chris. They kept me in the hospital and by the time I went home, I had severe postpartum depression. She's recently gone into therapy and one of her visions is a vision that she has where she's in her crib and she really wants me to come and it's my husband and that it's my mother and that it's my mother-in-law, and then it's my friend Joanie that would sit with me while Chris went to work and I never came.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:01:05):

That's one of the impacts of trauma is that shame based to you of the self people start blaming themselves. That's somehow you invited it or deserved it, or you didn't fight back hard enough. The healing needs to begin with some compassionate curiosity towards yourself. Not why, but why. It's a totally different conversation.

 

Mel Robbins (00:01:24):

It makes me sad that I didn't know this sooner, but I feel very grateful for your work.

 

(00:01:38):

Hey, it's your friend, Mel. I am so thrilled that you're here with me. It is always an honor to be able to spend time together with you. If you're brand new, welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. And I know because you chose to listen to this episode that you are the type of person who values your time and you're also interested in learning about ways that you can improve your life. I love that. I love that you're listening to this episode and you want to know what else I love. I love that you and I are going to get to spend time learning from the extraordinary Dr. Gabor Mate. Dr. Mate is a world renowned physician and bestselling author whose work dives deep into childhood development and the impact of trauma on how it shapes your mental and physical health over your lifetime. Dr. Mate has completely transformed how the world sees, talks about and understands trauma, and he has absolutely had that impact on me, and it's been life-changing.

 

(00:02:34):

I promise you this episode is going to shift the way you see everything, how you show up for yourself, how you connect with the people you love, and why you experience life the way that you do. It's going to help you understand why coping has become your default and how you can move toward true healing. I am so excited for both you and me. So please, please, please help me welcome the extraordinary Dr. Gabor mate to the Mel Robbins podcast. Before we dive in, Gabor, I would love to have you speak directly to the person who's listening to us and just share with them what they might expect to experience if they really take to heart what you're about to teach us and share with us today.

Mel Robbins (00:04:20):

I love that. No one is damaged goods.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:04:23):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:04:24):

We are going to unpack this in this conversation at length, but I think it might be helpful for someone who is not familiar with your work, if we could go back.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:04:34):

Sure.

 

Mel Robbins (00:04:34):

And can you share, if we go all the way back to your childhood, just what was happening in your life and in particular, how finding your mother's journal really impacted you and sent you in a certain direction in terms of your life's work?

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:04:51):

Well, so I was born 80 years ago this year in Budapest, Hungary, January, 1944. The Jewish parents whose lives were already impacted by the Second World War. My father was in forced labor with the Hungarian Army. A Jewish men had to go into forced labor when I was born, so he wasn't there when I was born in March, the German army occupied Hungary and then the genocide, the Holocaust that had obliterated the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, but not yet that of Hung began in our country. And within three months, between March and June, they murdered half a million Jews, including my grandparents. And we came very close to being deported ourselves, my mother and I. So I spent the first year of my life under Nazi occupation with the mother was terrorized and grief struck. Didn't know if my father was dead or alive for most of that year.

 

(00:05:52):

And then when I was 11 months of age to save my life, mother gave me to a complete stranger, Christian woman in the street. And she conveyed me to some relatives living in relative safety and hiding. I didn't see her for five or six weeks, and all this is recorded in the journal that she kept. I didn't discover the journal. I always had her journal, but for many years when I tried to read it, I'd get dizzy. It's almost like something me new that this is too painful for me to handle. So it wasn't until some years ago when my mother is still alive, when I asked her to actually read the journal to me so I could really read what happened. And she wrote in the journal that I'm writing this because if my son grows up, I want him to know what happened. So that's in a nutshell. But those events left a deep imprint in my nervous system, in my body and my psyche. And those traumatic events created a lot of psychological wounds in me that took me some years to even recognize, let alone to heal. And it wasn't until I was into the late adulthood and or middle age that I really began to deal with it and to recognize the subsequent impacts that then I passed on to my kids without meaning to, but just for the lack of awareness. So that's it in a nutshell.

 

Mel Robbins (00:07:26):

Well, that's a big nutshell.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:07:27):

Yeah. Wow.

 

Mel Robbins (00:07:30):

So how did those experiences in your life really start to shape your work? How did you start doing what you do today?

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:07:41):

Well, before it shaped my work, it shaped me and how functioned in the world or how I functioned in the world in so many ways. So it's when I began to experience challenges in my life. I was a successful doctor in my early forties, respected, but depressed and unhappy. I was made to the love of my life, and we had a very strained conflictual marriage, and my kids had issues in some ways they were afraid of me. I was very unpredictable. So all those issues then made me start looking for some answers. So the work began by having to look at myself and trying to understand the sources of my behaviors. And that coincided with me noticing things as a physician in my medical practice. And that's how I began to look at childhood development, the impacts of early years, the concept of trauma and what that represented and its impacts on adult or childhood mental health, physical illness, and so on. So both my personal experience and my professional kind of led me in this direction of exploration.

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:09:09):

They're largely decisive, and this begins even before birth. So already the emotional states of the mother while carrying the baby will affect the child's brain development.

 

Mel Robbins (00:09:23):

I just want to make sure that the person that's with us in this conversation really gets this because I didn't first learn that your emotional state and your physical state when you're carrying the child impacts the nervous system and development of the human being inside you. And it makes sense. But can you explain more about that? Because this is an idea that was brand new to me just a couple of years ago.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:09:52):

Sure. But we have to nail down. First is we're not blaming mothers here. They do their best. We're talking about the stress is acting on a pregnant woman. That's no fault of her own. But speaking of stress, when people are stressed, they release stress hormones, adrenal on cortisol. When the mother is stressed in pregnancy, those stress hormones go through the placenta, the umbilical cord to the baby that affects the child's nervous system and his development, the cortisol is a huge impact on the development of important brain circuits. You can look at the heart rate of infants in the womb as it changes, as the mother's more or less stressed. So these are just physiological facts. So there was a study done after nine 11, after the tragedy of nine 11 women who were pregnant then and who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder in the third trimester of pregnancy as a result of nine 11, their infants had abnormal stress hormone levels a year later. No abnormal stress levels have an impact on brain development and on physiology and physiological health as well. So you can expect those kids unless something's done to correct it to face more challenges later on.

 

(00:11:23):

And we know that mothers who are stressed during pregnancy, depressed during pregnancy, their children are more likely to have ADHD, attention deficit disorder, other mental health challenges. So it's just now what's interesting here is indigenous people have always known this. I was talking to a native group in British Columbia where I live, and this guy comes up to me and says, doc, in our community, when a woman was pregnant, there was a rule that if you're stressed or upset, you are not permitted to go near them. We didn't want your stress and upset to affect the baby. So this modern science has only confirmed indigenous wisdom, but it's a huge issue in this country, in this culture. People are so stressed for so many reasons.

 

Mel Robbins (00:12:08):

Well, it's interesting to listen to you explain all this because for me personally, your work has impacted both me and recognizing the way that childhood experiences and in vitro experiences when I was inside my mother's body impacted,

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:12:29):

Sorry, in Ute,

 

Mel Robbins (00:12:30):

In utero. Is that what it, okay. I'm not a medical doctor.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:12:33):

In vitro means in the laboratory.

 

Mel Robbins (00:12:34):

Oh, okay. You're right in utero. Exactly. So impacted me when I was inside my mother developing into a baby. And then I think about your work and the context of me as a stressed out mother and the state that I was in when I was carrying any one of our three children, and how that absolutely impacted their development. There's this kind of conflict that I feel between, oh gosh, I hurt my kids and I didn't mean to. And also this understanding that I think this is part of the human experience on some level.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:13:16):

Well, first of all, when my mother was carrying me, I don't think she even wanted to be pregnant. I mean, what Jewish woman really wanted to be pregnant in the middle of the second world war? When my renter husband is enforced labor I already knew to kids can feel if they're not wanted. I've seen this show up in many, many, many, many ways. Now, the thing that I would take up with you is on the one hand, there's the awareness that this is what happened, but the way you formulated that you hurt your kids, no pain flowed through you to your children, but you didn't hurt them. It's not that you did something deliberately or consciously to hurt them. It's just that the way it worked is that trauma is transmitted. But that's not to blame anybody. And it's really important to remove blame because parents feel so guilty already. Parents with kids who have challenges. Believe me, I've been one of them. There's a tremendous sense of guilt, which is entirely unwarranted and undeserved, and it doesn't even help. So let's just agree that the trauma does come through us, but we don't do it as such.

 

Mel Robbins (00:14:32):

That is incredibly helpful way to think about it. When you said that it's pain moving through you. Yeah,

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:14:38):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:14:38):

That made my shoulders drop. How do you define trauma, particularly for somebody who isn't aware whether or not they've experienced it?

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:14:49):

The way I define it is very straightforward. Trauma comes from a Greek word for wound or wounding. So trauma is a wound. It's a psychological wound. In this case, it could be a physical wound. But here we're talking about psychological wounds. The important distinction to make is that trauma is not what happened to you, it's what happened inside of you as a result of what happened to you. So in my case, my trauma wasn't that my mother gave me to a stranger. The trauma was the wound, which is that I perceive myself as not wanted. I perceive myself as abandoned. Who gets abandoned, somebody who doesn't deserve to be loved. So then I developed this sense of not being good enough, not being lovable enough. Now that means I spend much of my life trying to prove that I'm good, that I'm lovable, that I am important, which then drives all kinds of behaviors, which then create more problems. But the trauma is not the event. That's the traumatic episode, but the trauma is the wound that happens inside you. So if I get a blow in the head, that's not the trauma. The trauma is the concussion that I developed.

 

Mel Robbins (00:16:01):

Now, in that case, it's physical. And I want to hover here because for a long time I just assumed trauma was something that happened to people who were at war or were in a country that was occupied by a fascist government or country coming in like your parents were and that you were

 

(00:16:22):

Or somebody that was the victim of a violent crime. I never understood that. Experiences that may seem insignificant on the surface, somebody's mood, somebody criticizing you, feeling left out, that these are things that can also leave a mark, just like a blow to a head can actually leave a concussion. And I would love for you to explain to us what actually is a psychological wound. Because one of the things that I see happening a lot is people either shame themselves for being stuck or they say, I'm just too emotional, or I should just get over it. And there is something deeper that you mean when you say it's a psychological wound.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:17:08):

Well, that self-talk, that negative self-talk that you just articulated is itself a psychological wound. It's a sign of psychological wound. It's a sign of self ejection, which is one of the deepest impacts of trauma is that people traumatized. They develop a shame-based view of themselves. So they began to think that there's something wrong with them. That itself is a wound. Now, when you talked about seemingly insignificant things, we have to make a distinction here. There are what we call the Big T traumatic events. Those have been well-studied, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse of children, neglect, a parent being addicted, a parent dying, a parent being jailed, violence in the family, a rankers divorce, a parent being mentally ill, to which we need to add social factors such as poverty or racism. These are big traumatic events that can wound kids, and we can talk about the ways that happens, but you can also wound kids not by doing bad things to them that you shouldn't, but by not doing the good things that they need. In other words, children have certain needs. A human child is born with certain evolution, determined needs. Those children whose needs are not met that way, for example, for unconditional loving acceptance. And I'm not talking about the parent's love. I'm talking about the capacity of the parent to unconditionally accept the child and to see the child.

 

Mel Robbins (00:18:41):

What do you mean when you say unconditional acceptance? Because I think most of us, it's revelatory to hear No, no, no. There's a biological, hardwired need that you have as a child to feel unconditional acceptance and safety from the adults around you and in your environment. And if you do not feel that way, it creates a response inside your body. There is a reaction to that. But most of us, I think we even just skip over that fact, Gabor, that there's a fundamental need that a child has to feel accepted. And so what does that mean? If you could unpack it for us?

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:19:20):

Sure. Children get to experience and see themselves the way they are seen by the adults. So if a child gets emotional and they get criticized, then there's something wrong with their emotions.

 

(00:19:37):

If a child is very sensitive and they're told, don't be so sensitive, they think there's something wrong with them. If a child, a young toddler is behaving a certain way and the parent thinks that the way to correct this is to punish the child, then the child is just being a 2-year-old. Then the child begins to believe that there's something wrong with them, and they have to compensate for that by meeting the parents' expectations. So now the acceptance is no longer unconditional. I'll accept you if you look this way, talk this way, behave this way, and then all your life you'll be worried about how do people see you? That's a sign of a childhood wound because fundamentally, we need to be connected to ourselves. And when parents don't see us, we don't see ourselves. That's just a fact. And if you look at human evolution, we didn't evolve under the conditions that kids are raised now.

 

(00:20:47):

We evolved under conditions for millions of years until 15,000 years ago, living in small communities where there were many adults, it takes a village to raise a child. The kids were always with the parents. There was no separation. Kids were carried everywhere. There were not put down to let them cry it out. They were just unconditionally accepted and not punished, actually not hit. It's a totally different paradigm of parenting. That's how we evolved, which means that the human child expects to be treated that way unconsciously. When those needs are not met, kids are hurt. Children have another need, which is we're wired to have certain emotions along with other mammals. We're wired to have anger. Anger is essential for survival. Fear. We're wired to have fear. We're wired to have curiosity seeking. We're wired to have separation distress so that if the adult's not around, we should be upset. We should panic. So we cry. So the parents come and get us. We're wired for play, and children have this need that when those emotions arise, parents should understand those emotions and not necessarily do what the kid wants them to do, but to understand the child's feelings.

 

(00:22:20):

And when children are denied that kind of understanding, they think there's something wrong with their emotions, then they start telling themselves, I'm too emotional. I'm not good enough. I'm too sensitive. I am not lovable. Or when children don't get the attention that they need, guess what they develop? They need to be attractive so they can attract attention. Now, look at the damage done in this culture by people thinking that they need to meet certain standards of physical looks. And the trouble that people go to, it's all because they were not accepted just for who they were and not they're trying to attract attention.

 

Mel Robbins (00:23:03):

Is there a human being on the planet that doesn't have trauma from their childhood? Because I am sitting here listening, and it's an interesting conversation because you listen to it both from your experience, and I love that you said, we're not going to blame mothers, and pain is moving through people.

 

(00:23:23):

This Is why trauma passes through your family and through cultures generationally. And learning about this helps you understand the responses to your childhood that helped you survived, and it also helps you feel empowered to take responsibility.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:23:41):

That's right,

 

Mel Robbins (00:23:41):

To change those now subconscious responses that you have.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:23:45):

Yeah. So going back to your question about is there anybody on the planet? Yeah. But in this culture, that would be the exception because there's so many features of this culture that don't meet human needs, that make human life difficult. Look, the United States is the richest country in history. 70% of adults are at least on one medication. 40% of adults are at least on two medications. More and more kids are getting medicated for all kinds of conditions from ADHD to self cutting, to aggression, to so-called oppositionality, to anxiety, we can look at this two ways. Either human beings are just innately troubled or there's something wrong with the environment in which we're raising our kids and in which we're trying to striving to doing our best. But we're facing conditions that are anemical to healthy human development. So in a sense, when we talk about trauma, we're talking about the conditions under which parents have to function these days. If I was functioning in a laboratory trying to grow microorganisms, the word is called culturing. We're trying to culture organisms, laboratory culture. If in that laboratory culture, a lot of those microorganisms began to develop pathologies or die off, you have to say, this is a toxic culture.

 

(00:25:10):

Well, it's the same thing with human beings. So rather than looking at the source of people's problems strictly within themselves, we have to actually look at the conditions for any creature in the world, whether it's a plant or animal, you have to look at the conditions under which people are living and raising kids and trying to function. So that's what I'm doing here.

 

Mel Robbins (00:25:32):

When you think of childhood trauma, how do you identify it?

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:25:36):

Well, again, I mentioned those 10 conditions, the big T, the big Ts, ones adding to it, poverty and racism. Those things actually affect the physiology of the body. So people who are traumatized that way, they have a much higher risk. For example, people who've had several of those big experiences that I talked about have a high risk for autoimmune disease, high risk for cancer, much higher risk for addiction, much higher risk for mental health problems and so on.

 

Mel Robbins (00:26:08):

Why can you explain from a medical reason? Like in the body, this show is has listeners in 194 countries, and this might be the very first time as you're listening to God, earth, that you're actually starting to go, wait a minute. Everything that he's saying is what I experienced, or at least pieces of it. I've never considered that this could be trauma. And we've talked about it as a psychological wound, but I think it'd be really helpful if you also explained how does this create either programming or conditioning in your body that starts to define who you become as an adult and create behaviors that you never intended.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:26:51):

So that happens on both the physiological and the psychological level.

 

(00:26:56):

On the physiological level, trauma, insights, inflammation in the body. So people who are severely mized in childhood, you can measure the level of inflammatory particles in their bloodstream. They'll be abnormally high, which makes them more at risk for cancer, more at risk for autoimmune disease, more at risk for depression, mental health problems, and so on. That's just a physiological fact. Trauma can affect the way genes are turned on and off. So genes don't function independently. There are very few conditions that are purely genetically determined. There are some one runs in my family, muscular dystrophy. If you inherit the gene, you'll have the disease, but that's very rare relatively. But genes are turned off by the environment, so the wrong genes can be turned on and the right genes can be turned off by trauma. Then trauma can dysregulate the body's stress mechanism. So people are secreting more cortisol and adrenaline.

 

(00:27:56):

These are the stress hormones, which in the short term are lifesaving, because if I was threatened or youer, we would generate cortisol adrenaline from an adrenal gland and we would be stronger and faster and better able to counter the threat either to escape or to fight back. But in the long term, those same stress hormones thin the bones, create more clotting in the blood, narrow the blood vessels, elevate the high blood pressure, elevate the blood pressure as you get hypertension, suppress the immune system, put fat on your belly, creating higher risk for heart disease, makes you depressed, ulcerate your intestines. These are the stress hormones. Wow. So there's all that on the physiological side, and I could say more about it, but for example, I mentioned racism. So if you look at the chromosomal aging of black people in this country, they age faster than Caucasians, and black kids already have higher blood pressure measurements than their Caucasian counterparts. It's got nothing to do with genetics. It's got to do with the stress of racism. A black woman in this country, the more episodes of racism they experience, the higher the risk for asthma.

 

(00:29:15):

Children whose parents are stressed are at higher risk for asthma. This has been known for decades. I could go on a great length about that. So these are some of the physiological impacts then are the emotional impacts. So in my case, being given to a stranger gives me the sense of not being wanted important. Then I develop behaviors where I try and prove my importance. So I become a workaholic doctor, so I drive myself too hard and I don't pay so much attention to my family out there trying to prove my importance in the world. Now that has impact on my kids, that has an impact on my marriage. So there's these behavior emotional impacts, which is uncertain behaviors. Then we can talk about addictions. Addictions is a huge consequence of childhood trauma of all kinds, and there's all kinds of science behind that. So one more thing. If I may say when people get the message that their emotions aren't acceptable to the adults, children will push down their feelings in order to be accepted, and they'll try to be nice and cooperative, and they'll try to fit in with other people's expectations, which then means they'll be stressed all the time, which then potentially has all kinds of illness.

 

Mel Robbins (00:30:42):

I am sitting here thinking about ways in which I can try to distill down what you're saying because the information has been so life-changing for me in my own life to really accept, acknowledge and seek to understand how childhood experiences created a traumatic response inside of me. And I want to focus on the, I guess you would call it the smaller T stuff, which is that you have fundamental needs as a child, and when they are not provided to you that it creates trauma inside of you. And is it fair to say that another way to think about trauma is that it's something happening outside of you that creates this almost like alarm or bracing in your body? It's like it kind of flips you into that fight or flight. Because I have this experience of not going back through my childhood and not seeing anything that's massive related to my parents, but just having this sense of constantly being on edge, constantly feeling like it's my job to make everybody happy, don't say the wrong thing, this vigilance, and I never knew where it came from.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:32:02):

Yeah, well, the child is very sensitive to the parent's emotional states. And even if, for example, one of the ways you can tell if a marriage is troubled is that you can ask the parents or you can measure the child's stress hormone levels. So the stresses of the parents are directly related, affecting the child's physiology and the child's psychology. So you may not have articulated and clearly see what was going on, but especially if you're a sensitive person and that is genetic sensitivity, you'll feel exactly what's going on and you'll think it's all about you. And then you also develop the belief that it's your job to fix it. And then when you can't fix it, you have this tremend, a sense of guilt and shame because you feel that your job of making your parents happy, which never should have been the child's job in the first place.

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:02):

What is a child supposed to do?

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:33:04):

About what?

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:07):

Just as you're growing up, it's interesting because I think so many people, at least in my life, and my lived experience is that's my job, to protect myself, to make everybody happy

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:33:19):

Too. But you see, that's how you survived. Because what you needed most of all is a relationship with your parents. And one of the needs of children that I haven't mentioned is what we can call rest, which means because in a rest estate, we can develop and grow and unfold. Now rest means the child doesn't have to work to make the relationship work with the parent. The relationship is just there. There's nothing the child can do to break the relationship. Now, in a situation where that's not the case, then the child necessarily has to work to make the relationship work because without that relationship, they know they can't survive. So that adaptation, the hypervigilance on your part, remember I said in the beginning that nobody's damaged goods, so that hypervigilance on your part, and I believe that it's your job to make the situation peaceful. That's an adaptation on your part.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:17):

So that's a form of trauma.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:34:18):

That's an outcome of trauma. The problem is that that becomes then wired into your personality. But children don't have any choice in the matter. They have to adapt to this situation, those adaptations, they become wired into their personalities, and that's who they think they are. That's not who they are. Those are their adaptations, their trauma showing up in their behavior and in their emotional functioning.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:45):

One of the ways that I've seen people really deny the existence of trauma inside a family is between siblings, where two siblings will grow up in the same household and be like, well, that never happened, or Mom wasn't like that, or You're just being too sensitive in your work, what have you discovered about how siblings can grow up in the same house?

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:35:07):

No siblings grow up in the same house. No siblings have the same parents, no siblings have the same family. No siblings have the same childhood. Why not? The whole lot of reasons? Number one, there's the birth order. Parents don't relate to the first child the way they relate to the second child. Then there's gender differences. Parents don't relate to, I'm not talking about whether the parents love the kids or not. I'm talking about what actually happens. The child doesn't experience. The parents love the child experiences the way the parent shows up. So number one. Number two, the parent's relationship might be in a different phase, one child and another, then the parents might be in a different economic situation. The parents' life might be different. Then each child will evoke a different response from the parent.

Mel Robbins (00:36:32):

Well, I am sitting here listening again kind of from two places. One as a mother and one as a human being who was a daughter who has recognized that there were lots of small things that happened.

 

(00:36:49):

And one big thing that created a tremendous, like a traumatic response inside me that created hypervigilance and anxiety and probably ADHD. And I'm also thinking, and I'm going to share this, I think it'll be really helpful that I had a wildly traumatic birth. I was two weeks overdue. They had to induce me here in Boston. And my daughter Sawyer, who is sitting outside the studio and worked on the Let Them Theory book with me, she did not want to come out. So it was 36 hours they had to use a forceps, didn't work. They ended up doing a vacuum extraction. And then I tore and I got rushed to emergency surgery and lost two and a half liters of blood. And they sent Sawyer home with Chris. They kept me in the hospital. And by the time I went home, my skin was as gray as a dolphin, and I had severe postpartum depression and the kind gabor where I could not be alone with her because I was in such a depressive and scary state, and I was on medications that made it completely unsafe for me to breastfeed her. I understand. And for the first 10 weeks of her life, I was a zombie on medication. And oh my God, it just kills me to think about this. And she's recently gone into therapy and has started doing EMDR.

 

(00:38:27):

And one of her visions when they kind of trace responses to stressful things in the moment, and it goes all the way back to the first vision is a vision that she has where she's in her crib and she really wants me to come, and it's my husband, and then it's my mother, and then it's my mother-in-law, and then it's my friend Joanie that would sit with me while Chris went to work. And I never came.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:38:58):

So we went through the same thing with one of our children. My wife had severe postpartum depression. She couldn't even look at the kid. And so let me say a couple of things here. One is that sometimes birth trauma happens, but yours was severe. Now, birth was created by nature in a certain way. And during the birth process, there's natural hormones that are released both in the mother and the infant. It's been called a love cocktail. It's a combination of internal opiates and oxytocin and other brain chemicals which create the bonding between the mother and the infant. Now, sometimes medical intervention is lifesaving and essential, but we've medicalized birth so much that we interfere with it so much now that we're gaining a lot of birth trauma where it's not necessary. I'm not saying that was the case in your case situation, but nevertheless, we're doing it a lot.

 

(00:40:03):

And that interferes with mother and child bonding, number one. Number two, the child does have this need to stay with the mother's body for many months because the human child is the least developed and the least mature and the most dependent of any mammal and the maturation like a horse can run on the first day of life. Human beings can't do that for a year and a half. The horse is a year and a half ahead of us in terms of brain development. That's because we develop these big brains, these big heads. If we waited any more than nine months, we would never get born. Sometimes even now, we barely get born because the head gets stuck, which is probably what happened in your case,

 

(00:40:47):

Which means that the development that in other animals happens in the womb and human beings have to happen outside the womb that's been called exter gestation. There's intero gestation in the womb and exter gestation outside the womb. Now that means the mother's body, the mother's skin, the mother's heartbeat close to the baby for many, many, many, many months. So when that doesn't happen in the us, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth, which is a massive abandonment. Now, they don't do it because they want have to do it for economic reasons. It's a massive abandonment of children. So there's the birth trauma and its impacts, which then is the mother's depression, and that has an impact on the infant. So people, kids whose mothers were depressed postpartum have a higher risk of ADHD. And we can talk about why that's the case.

 

Mel Robbins (00:41:48):

Why is that the case? Because all three of my children have a HD.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:41:53):

Well, I can tell you what the first book I ever wrote Scattered Minds was an ADHD after I was diagnosed. And we can talk about that, but let me just say it now. That's just the case and we can discuss it. They've done electroencephalograms on six month old infants whose mother was depressed and whose mother was not depressed. You could tell from the EG of the infant whose mother is depressed and whose is not because the depressed mother loves the child any less, or is any iota less devoted than the non-depressed mother. But because depress depressed mother can't respond to the infant with the same smiling, playful, attuned interaction which the child needs for healthy brain development, it's a sacred thing. And society needs to hold. Its sacred. Now, how mothers used to develop or raise children is in the community where they gave birth in the community where they were doulas, where no, mind you, they didn't have the advantages of modern medicine, which again, I'm not dismissing, I'm just talking about how we evolved. And there was such a thing as alo mothering. Other mothers would come and support the mother when a mother needed to rest. Other women would come and hold the baby,

 

(00:43:17):

And mothers are left very much on their own in the society. And that depression in the mother then affects the child's brain development. Not only that, given that we develop a sense of ourselves based on how the adults look at us, when the mother or the parents can't look at the child or they can't hold the child again, the child begins to feel there's something wrong with them.

 

Mel Robbins (00:43:42):

It feels like there's a million ways for this to actually happen. Well, there is, and I share the story because it's true. I was a completely different mother when I gave birth to our second child, Kendall just 19 months later, and her birth was different, and Chris and I were different. And so I can see how, without any ill intention, you are a very different parent.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:44:10):

Absolutely.

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:10):

And the child is a very different child.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:44:12):

And the child is one of a different temperament.

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:14):

Correct.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:44:16):

They experience you differently to start with,

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:18):

How does this sort of unresolved trauma from childhood that I would imagine a lot of us learn about this as an adult, and then we start to recognize that this is an explanation for a lot of the patterns of behavior that you don't really like, but you're not quite sure how to get control of them.

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:44:45):

So the body's stress regulation apparatus, which is physiological, it has to do with the connection between certain brain centers down to the adrenal gland, which is the stress gland. You might say No child is born with stress regulation. Infants don't how to regulate their stresses.

 

Mel Robbins (00:45:06):

Well, neither do adults.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:45:08):

Well, as you say in your book, most adults are eight years old if that. I thought that was pretty generous. It might have been three or four years old. Well, stress radiation like other functions has to develop so that when something stressful happens, I know how to face it without being overwhelmed. And that depends on the development of these brain circuits and receptors for brain chemicals. Now, trauma interferes with the development of the body stress regulation apparatus, so that become adults and we don't know how to handle stress, and then we seek escapes. And one of the ways that people escape from stress is addictive behaviors,

 

(00:45:53):

For example. So if you talk about or talk to addicts, I feel like at my own addictive behaviors, even if I go sober for a while and then I relapse, what usually happened is that I got stressed and then I reached for that addictive outlet as a way of soothing my stress. So that's how it shows up. But physiologically, it shows up by a dysregulation of the body's stress regulation apparatus. So there's not just psychological, we're talking physiology. And you've done these studies in laboratory animals where the way the mother handles that infant rat pup in the first few days of life will have an impact on the adult rat's capacity to handle stress. And if you take the rats, by the way, whose mothers don't handle them as well, and you put them with mothers who do their brains develop normally. So it's not a genetic effect what's called an epigenetic effect. It's the environment acting on the genes,

 

Mel Robbins (00:46:58):

Which is why we come back to your original point. No human being is damaged goods.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:47:02):

No,

 

Mel Robbins (00:47:03):

The good news is that if you can recognize that your response to stress and traumatic situations and overwhelming emotional situations is something that you can identify and change, that that's what the opportunity is here in terms of being able to heal and resolve trauma.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:47:24):

Absolutely. And especially if you begin by recognizing that it's not your fault. There's nothing wrong with you. When I

 

Mel Robbins (00:47:31):

Think about my husband who absolutely experienced trauma by having a dad that was a workaholic and never around and narcissistic personality style and lots of drinking and stress in the marriage, and his response to stress is to just shut down. The man goes silent and stoic. And in our marriage, one of the things that have come up a lot, which you can direct line to his response to his own childhood is he doesn't really know what his needs are because they weren't met.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:48:08):

That's right.

 

Mel Robbins (00:48:09):

And for him, it took a long time to call that trauma from his childhood because he is like, well, I had food. My parents were there, I went to school. It's not like they beat me. And for me, I am the opposite. I'm a reactor. I'm a human volcano. And when I get dysregulated or triggered or upset or overwhelmed, I'm like, and it's even though I know this and I've been working on it, and I am a completely different human being, I feel that way over the last three years. I still erupt.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:48:56):

Well join the club.

 

Mel Robbins (00:48:57):

And so how do you personally navigate your daily challenges and when you get overwhelmed by stress?

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:49:06):

So lemme say something with Chris first if I may. Yes,

 

Mel Robbins (00:49:09):

Please.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:49:11):

When he says that I wasn't beaten or we weren't starving, I had food and therefore I wasn't traumatized, here's what I would say to him. So listen, Chris, let's take one of your kids and let's say you were an alcoholic, which means that you came home in different moods all the time and the kids couldn't rely on who dad was going to be for woman until the next. And your mom was constantly stressed. And if you were this way, do you think your kids wouldn't be hurt by that? So just plug your kid into the situation that you're in. You see how, and if one of your kids came to you and said, dad, I don't like it that you're drinking and you're behaving this way or that way and you're a workaholic, ain't never around. What'd you say to your kid? Well, there's food on the table. What are you complaining about?

 

Mel Robbins (00:50:01):

No, but I did.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:50:02):

Yeah,

 

Mel Robbins (00:50:03):

No, that happened in our house like 15 years ago and he felt bad and I was an asshole. Again, more trauma and more pain passing on to our kids.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:50:17):

Yeah. I'm just saying that when people look at their own childhoods, they kind of minimize

 

Mel Robbins (00:50:23):

Why do we do that?

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:50:24):

Because it was too painful to accept in the first place so that people disassociate and they disconnect from their bodies and their feelings. Now, you said that he had a hard time feeling what he feels that itself is a trauma impact. It's a protection. It's not a flaw, it's not a damage. It's an adaptation. If I was hurting you right now and you couldn't escape and you couldn't fight back and you couldn't ask for help, then dissociating and not experiencing your feelings would be your only protection. But then it gets wired into you. And then all your life you go through not knowing what you feel and not knowing what your needs are. So again, it's an adaptation. That's what I'm saying is that nobody's damaged goods. These are just adaptations. The abnormalities is not an individual. It's in the circumstances to which the individual had to respond that way so that his response or yours, or mine for that matter, were perfectly normal responses to abnormal circumstances. I say abnormal in a sense, circumstances that did not meet human needs.

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:53:12):

They did.

 

Mel Robbins (00:53:13):

And that there was a lot that I didn't remember. And I'm wondering if you could just talk to the person who's listening, who is having that for the first time, where they're really accepting that some of the behaviors and the negative self-talk and the anxiety, that this is a result of experiences that you had as a child where you were not given the things that you needed.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:53:43):

Mel, there's a lot in what you said. Okay, first you behave that way by default. There's a difference between default and fault.

 

(00:53:52):

Okay? Default. You didn't know you were doing it, you didn't know any better. You were just following patterns that were programmed into you, but it's not your fault. Okay? There's a huge difference, important distinction, number one. Number two, it's never the child's job to make the parents happy or to create peace in their family. And the child invariably fails, which instills a huge sense of guilt and inadequacy for not having fulfilled a task that never ought to be, never should have been yours in the first place. It's a reversal of roles because whose job it is to hold who emotionally to create peace. And so when a child is forced into that position, again as an adaptation, maintain a relationship with the parents, she's given an impossible task that she's bound to fail at and bound to feel shame over it, which means that any shame and guilt that you feel is completely undeserved. When we start to noticing these patterns, we can start asking ourselves questions, but it depends on how we ask them. So I could say, why am I behaving this way? Is that a question?

 

Mel Robbins (00:55:08):

No, it's an indictment.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:55:09):

It's an indictment. But I said, Hmm, I wonder why I'm behaving that way. So we need to begin to develop that compassionate curiosity towards the self where we start looking not too wide, not this indictment as you say, but genuine curiosity. And from that perspective, everything, pretty much everything anybody thinks is wrong with them is actually because there's an adaptation, or it begins as a failure of development because the conditions for development were not adequate. And so then we can understand. Now, it's not a question of being victims. That's the last thing we want to do, is to foster victim mentality. They did this to me and I can't help it. No, that happened. And it's your responsibility and it's your capacity to change that now. So you have to drop the victim mode altogether. But that doesn't mean that we don't recognize what happened. So to say that stuff happened to you. And I get the sense that something big happened that you haven't articulated yet, but something big happened to you at some point. To recognize that is not to say that you're a victim, it's just say that whatever happened had certain impacts and fostered certain adaptations on your part that made you behave and undermine your development in certain way.

 

Mel Robbins (00:56:33):

Oh, I'll share it with you. When I was in the fourth grade, I woke up in the middle of the night on a family vacation and an older kid was on top of me.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:56:40):

Okay. All right.

 

Mel Robbins (00:56:42):

And that had massive implications on my life.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:56:47):

In what way?

 

Mel Robbins (00:56:48):

I was fourth grade and I was sound asleep. So I was in a safe space, wake up to an older kid on top of me who was fondling me. And in the scheme of things that can happen, it was here I go to dismissing it. You're looking at me, you're like, no,

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:57:10):

No, no, no, don't go there.

 

Mel Robbins (00:57:11):

Okay. Okay. But it's almost like I'm shaming myself for having trauma about this.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:57:16):

No. Can I unpack this for you a little bit? Sure. Are you open to it?

 

Mel Robbins (00:57:20):

Oh, I'm so open to it. Yeah.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:57:21):

Okay. Here's the question I'm going to ask you.

 

Mel Robbins (00:57:24):

Okay.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:57:25):

How did you feel when this happened?

 

Mel Robbins (00:57:28):

I felt very confused and scared.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:57:30):

Confused and scared. Good enough. Who did you speak to about it?

 

Mel Robbins (00:57:33):

No one. Okay.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:57:36):

Now, if something like this happened to one of your daughters, was it grade four?

 

Mel Robbins (00:57:42):

Yeah.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:57:43):

Okay. If one of these things happened to Sawyer or Kendall and grade four, and if they didn't talk to you, how would you explain that?

 

Mel Robbins (00:57:54):

I'd feel, how would I explain it? I would explain it. And I'm about to go intellectual. I personally, as the mother would feel heartbroken.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:58:03):

I understand how you'd feel, but really, I'm not asking her too. I'm asking how you would explain it. Why it wasn't my daughter talking to me about feeling scared and confused and violated. Why

 

Mel Robbins (00:58:14):

She didn't feel safe talking to me.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:58:16):

That's the trauma began before that happened. If you had been able to talk to your parents and they would've said, this is awful. You must feel terrible. Come here. Let me hold you, and let's deal with the situation. So the trauma is not only in what happened is that you were so alone with it happened, and that aloneness was yours before this traumatic event ever occurred. As a matter of fact, abusers can tell with almost laser-like accuracy, who's defended and protected and who's not, who can be victimized and who cannot. So that your primary traumatic event was not this event, not that this wasn't traumatic, of course it was hugely traumatic, but it became hugely dramatic. You were alone. And that sense of lack of safety and lack of protection. Furthermore, you may not even have wanted to bother your parents. They were already stressed enough. Already you are protecting them. That's the primary traumatic situation.

 

Mel Robbins (00:59:23):

I've never looked at it like that.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:59:25):

Yeah. Do you see that one? I

 

Mel Robbins (00:59:26):

Mean, oh, a thousand percent. And I can also see when I think about experiences that friends have shared with me where they did say something and then there was denial,

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:59:36):

There was dismissal in there

 

Mel Robbins (00:59:37):

Or dismissal, or we're not going to tell anybody, or this stays within us. Or even if they then go after the person and confront it, it blows up. And somehow you're to blame. And so I can see how

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (00:59:53):

That's right.

 

Mel Robbins (00:59:54):

And of course, when you shove it down, you then think you've done something wrong. And that was the other thing that happened for me, is that I felt like I had done something wrong.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:00:02):

That's one of the impacts of trauma, is that shame based you of themselves. People start blaming themselves that somehow you invited it or deserved it, or you didn't fight back hard enough, or which if you didn't, was also self-protection. Protection.

 

Mel Robbins (01:00:17):

Well, I think that was one of the original moments, at least that I remember where I literally left my body and disassociated,

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:00:25):

Which was a defense.

 

Mel Robbins (01:00:27):

Yes.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:00:28):

So again, it's an adaptation. So that's what I would say about that incident.

 

Mel Robbins (01:00:33):

It makes perfect sense.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:00:35):

But again, the problem is in the environment, in the lack of being held and being seen. So there's nothing in your initial impulse when you began a narrative about how it's not as bad as what? Right. Would you say that to you?

 

Mel Robbins (01:00:53):

Oh my

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:00:54):

God, no. If your daughter comes to you and says, well, it's not so bad, think of all the kids that are being beaten. So their lack of self-compassion is one of the ways that trauma shows up. And that's why I'm saying the healing needs to begin with some compassionate curiosity towards the self. Not why, but why. It's a totally different conversation.

 

Mel Robbins (01:01:17):

And then I can also see and take responsibility and have a lot of compassion for how my volatility emotionally.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:01:25):

Absolutely.

 

Mel Robbins (01:01:26):

Just pass that on to my daughters.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:01:27):

Absolutely.

 

Mel Robbins (01:01:28):

And so there are things that happened to them that in the time they didn't feel comfortable coming to me because the exact same thing.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:01:37):

Exactly.

 

Mel Robbins (01:01:38):

And of course, just it makes me sad that I didn't know this sooner, but I feel very grateful for your work because I know it now and so do our children, and so does my husband. And that knowledge gives you the ability to truly address the things that happened and the response that happened in your body, and how that has created these default patterns and this inability to manage stress or emotion or conflict in a way that is healthy and that keeps you connected to yourself instead of constantly abandoning yourself and feeling disappointed in yourself and shaming yourself. And so while I can reflect on that with a lot of sadness and grief and regret, I feel more empowered, honestly.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:02:49):

Well, that's the whole point

 

Mel Robbins (01:02:50):

About what's possible.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:02:51):

That's the whole point, is that we all want to be free, but as long as we're running on default mode and we're just reacting to stuff, there's no freedom in it.

 

(01:02:59):

We're actually like puppets on the string. And if you remember Pinocchio, when he becomes a little boy, he says, how silly, how fully I was when I was a puppet, where we're all puppets in that sense. As long as these traumatic impacts are running our lives, we're puppets on a string, and those strings are unconscious. So it's the whole thing about becoming really free. And that real freedom depends on looking at how it was and getting in touch with our capacity to take responsibility now. So what really the work is for all of us is how to become free so it can be in the present moment connected to ourselves. The great trauma psychologist Peter Levine says, I'm no longer living under the tyranny of the past. And it's totally available. It's totally possible.

 

Mel Robbins (01:03:46):

It is totally possible, and it's possible for you. It's possible for your children, it's possible for anybody that you know and love. It's possible for your parents if they accept the invitation to look at themselves

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:03:57):

If they choose it. Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (01:03:58):

Yes. What is the first step? Is it asking the question? Why? Just being curious with a level of compassion. Why am I like this? Because if I reflect on your question, that's what happened for me. I started to say to myself, it's no longer tolerable for me to operate like this. I don't want to be this person. I don't want to feel like this. I don't want to feel disconnected from other people. I don't want to have this level of anger inside

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:04:26):

Me. So that's actually the first step, is to recognize one's suffering rather than taking it for granted, which incidentally is the Buddha's first teaching is that life is dca, life is brings suffering. And then the second question is, okay, why? So it does begin with recognizing the suffer, whether denying it and running away from it. And there's many ways to run away from our pain, certain behaviors and addictions. And the point is, stop running from your pain except that it's there and be curious about it without blaming yourself for it. So those are the first steps. And then you ask for help. I mean, if help is available, the natural, we are born seeking help. You've never met a one year, one day old infant that doesn't know ask for help. But let me ask you a question, how easy it has been going back for you to ask for help?

 

Mel Robbins (01:05:30):

You mean if I think about when I was in fourth grade,

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:05:35):

Dan and even decades later, can you ask for help or is that a challenge for you?

 

Mel Robbins (01:05:41):

Well, I asked for a lot of help now.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:05:43):

No, I don't mean now before your transformation.

 

Mel Robbins (01:05:47):

Absolutely. When you just said that I had this epiphany.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:05:53):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (01:05:54):

That I've always felt like I got to do it myself.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:05:57):

Exactly.

 

Mel Robbins (01:05:57):

I've always felt like it's on me. I've always felt like, I'll just take this on. I'll just do this.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:06:04):

Which was an adaptation. There was no help available.

 

Mel Robbins (01:06:09):

But you know what's interesting?

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:06:10):

Sorry, go ahead.

 

Mel Robbins (01:06:11):

Is you just said there's no help available and I felt this knee jerk need

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:06:14):

Yeah. To protect your parents.

 

Mel Robbins (01:06:16):

Yes.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:06:17):

I understand.

 

Mel Robbins (01:06:18):

Because I do know, I know my mom well enough to know that she would've picked up a shovel and probably clocked the kid into next week.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:06:27):

Yeah. That's not what you needed your mother to do. You needed mother to say, oh gee, that's awful. Come here. Let's talk about it. You weren't born not knowing how to ask for help. You were born with a supreme capacity to ask for help. I mean, as we know, any infant knows how to ask for help. So something educates it out of us. Something compels us to suppress our capacity to seek help. So if the first step is recognizing our suffering, and the second step is getting curious about it, then the third step is, I need some help here.

 

Mel Robbins (01:07:09):

It's beautiful.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:07:11):

It's only the simple truth.

 

Mel Robbins (01:07:15):

It is so simple when you lay it out like that.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:07:18):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (01:07:19):

And it's also so freeing.

 

Dr. Gabor Maté (01:07:20):

Yeah.